The Unread Shelf

The wind off the water had turned cold enough that I regretted stuffing the good scarf, the wool one my sister sent from up north two Christmases ago, into the bottom of the grocery bag instead of around my neck, and I hauled the grocery bag higher on my hip and kept walking. Tuesdays are my shopping days. I go down to the little market at the end of the main street, I buy what I can carry, and I walk the mile back to my house on the dune side of Sandskip, and that is the whole errand. In the off season the town empties out and the summer rentals go dark behind their shutters, and I like it that way. I have liked it that way for a long time now.

I am sixty-two years old. I retired from the university library nine years ago, and before that I spent my forties and fifties among the stacks and the catalog and the steady shuffle of students who never seemed to know where the reference section was no matter how many signs I put up. I was good at the work. I liked the order of it, the quiet, the way a day could be measured in returned books and answered questions. I never married. There was one romance, a long time ago now, with a colleague, and when it ended I decided that solitude suited me better than hoping did, and I have never regretted it. That is not the same as saying I never think about it. But mostly I don't.

The bag had the usual in it, eggs, a loaf of the seedy bread I like, two apples, a small chicken, and a jar of the pickled onions from the shelf by the register that I buy more often than I should. The light was going grey over the water in that way it does in October, all silver and no color, and the gulls were making their usual racket over by the diner dumpsters. I remember thinking about the chicken, whether to roast it that night or wait until Wednesday, which is the kind of thought my head settles into these days. Comfortable. Shallow water. I hadn't thought of Melina in years, and I mean that honestly, not in the way people say it when they think about someone every day. She had moved away, a job in another state, and we had let it end the way things end when neither person fights for them, politely and by mail, and then not at all.

That was seventeen years ago. I was forty-five when we met, she was forty-three, and we had six months, which at the time felt like both everything and somehow not enough. But that was a different Louise, a middle-aged Louise with a job and a routine that included another person, and the Louise walking home with a chicken in her bag was sixty-two and had long since filed all that under finished. Or so I thought, which is what I would tell you before that evening, anyway.

* * *

The Driftwood Reader sits about halfway down the main street, between the shuttered ice cream place and the row of summer cottages that Tilly's brother owns and never quite fills. Tilly runs the shop herself, mostly, with a high school kid on Saturdays in season, and in the off season she keeps the hours she pleases, which suits her. We go back a long way, Tilly and me, to the old library circle, the friends-of-the-library suppers and the book sales where we all sorted donations by feel and gossip. She hosts themed evenings now and then, poetry nights, mystery nights, anything that gets a dozen people in off the street to drink the boxed wine she buys and buy a book on the way out.

I pushed the door open with my shoulder because my hands were full, and the little bell over it did its thing, and the warmth of the gas fireplace hit me along with the smell of paper and Tilly's ever-present coffee. She was behind the counter wrapping something in tissue paper, one of her mail orders, and she looked up and did a thing with her face that I didn't read right away. I thought she was squinting at me over her glasses the way she does when I've tracked in sand.

"There you are," she said, setting down the tissue. "I was half hoping you'd come in today."

"Why half," I said, putting the grocery bag on the counter next to the register, because the counter is where everything gets put in that shop.

"Because you've got a visitor and I wasn't sure how you'd feel about it." She said it lightly, but Tilly never says anything lightly without meaning to, and I felt my stomach do a small drop, the way it does when the phone rings late.

"A visitor," I said. "It's not my sister. If it's my sister she can mail the scarf."

"It's not your sister."

I was still turned toward the counter when I heard the floorboard by the back room creak, the one that has creaked since before Tilly bought the place, and I turned around, and there she was, standing at the poetry shelf with a book open in her hands. Melina. Older, of course, we both were, sixty now, her hair gone silver at the temples and shorter than I remembered, and softer through the face, if that makes sense, like the years had rounded her the way the sea rounds a brick. She was wearing a green scarf and a long grey coat and she was pretending, very badly, to read the spine in her hands, because I could see her eyes were on me.

"Tilly," I said, not taking my eyes off her, "you could have warned me properly."

"I did warn you. Sort of. I said visitor." Tilly picked her tissue paper back up and got very busy with it, which is her way of stepping out of a scene she has set up on purpose, and I knew her well enough to know she had known exactly who was standing at her poetry shelf and exactly what day I come past the window.

Melina closed the book without looking at it and put it back on the shelf upside down, and I remember noticing that, the upside down book, because my hands wanted something to do and my feet did not move. Seventeen years. She looked at me and I looked at her and the fireplace made its little gas noise and outside a truck went by with something rattling in its bed.

"Hello, Louise," she said. Her voice was the same. Lower than I'd built it up in my head, actually, or maybe my head had drifted it higher over the years, but the same in the way she put a small pause before my name.

"Melina." I said it and then stood there like the greeter at a church who has run out of programs. "I. Well. This is a surprise."

"It is," she agreed, and came a step or two closer, not close, just closer. "I'm in town for a few weeks. My sister has the house on the point this year and she bullied me into staying a while, and I heard Tilly had a shop, so."

"So you came in to browse the poetry section," I said, "which you never did when I knew you. You were a fiction woman. Mysteries, mostly, and you read the endings first, which I never forgave."

"I've broadened," she said, and smiled, and the smile had a wrinkle at one corner that hadn't been there before and that did something to the middle of my chest that I was not prepared for. "You look well, Louise. You look exactly like yourself."

"Where else would I be," I said, and Tilly snorted from the counter without looking up, and Melina laughed, one short breath of it, and it was strange how fast the old rhythms came back, like riding a bicycle down a hill you used to live on.

We made small talk for ten minutes or so. Her sister's name was Rena, I knew Rena slightly from the old days, and the house on the point leaked in a rainstorm and she was dealing with it, and she'd taken the ferry over on Sunday and the crossing had been rough. I told her about my retirement, the pension, the walks on the cold beach, the routine, and she listened the way she used to listen, meaning she actually listened, and asked one question about the library and two about the town and none about why I'd never married. I noticed that. I noticed that I was glad she didn't ask.

Tilly declared she had inventory to do in the back, which was a lie so thin you could read a newspaper through it, and left us standing between the poetry shelf and the armchair with the burnt cushion. I picked up my grocery bag from the counter because holding something helped, and the chicken shifted in it and the pickled onions clinked.

"Listen," Melina said, and fiddled with the end of her green scarf, wrapping it once around her fingers and letting it go. "This is a strange thing to ask, and if it's a stupid one you can say so and I'll buy a paperback and go."

"Ask it anyway," I said. "I'm curious now. You've gone and made me curious, which at my age is an event."

"What if," she said, and stopped, and started over. "What if we pretended, just for tonight, that we were strangers. That we'd just met here in this shop. No history, no reckoning, none of it. Just two women of a certain age talking by a fire." She looked at me over the top of her glasses, which she'd started wearing somewhere in those seventeen years. "I've been wondering for years, off and on, whether we'd still have found each other if we hadn't found each other. If that makes any sense at all."

I stood there with my bag of groceries and my comfortable shallow-water thoughts, and I looked at her, older and softer and standing in a bookshop in a town she had no history in, and I heard myself say, "It makes sense. It's a strange kind of sense, but it makes it."

"So. Yes?"

"I don't know yet," I said, truthfully, because my heart was not racing but my mind was going somewhere at a fair clip. "Let me put this chicken in a cold spot and think about it while you pick out a book you're actually going to buy. Tilly counts on the sales."

Melina laughed again, the same short breath, and turned back to the shelf, and I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, watching her choose.

I asked Tilly about the cold spot and she waved me toward the little fridge behind the counter where she kept her own lunch, a yoghurt and half a sandwich most days, and I put the chicken in there, leaving the pickled onions in the bag for later. Then I took my time walking back, straightening a display table that did not need straightening, and thought about whether I was actually considering this or just enjoying the flattered feeling of being considered. At sixty-two you learn to tell those two things apart, or you think you do.

She had pulled three paperbacks off the used shelf and was sitting in the armchair with the burnt cushion, reading the first line of one and then the second line, which meant she was reading the beginning for once, not the end, and something about that made my decision for me before I had properly made it.

"All right," I said. "Strangers. Until Tilly comes back or the shop closes, whichever comes first. No past. If either of us mentions the library or the ferry or anything real, the other one gets to say nothing at all and just keep going."

"That's a very librarian rule," she said.

"I don't know you well enough yet to take that as an insult," I said, and she laughed, and we shook hands, which was ridiculous, her hand was warm and her grip was the same, and we sat down across from each other like two people at a bus stop who have decided the bus is never coming.

***

The rules of the game, once we got going, turned out to be that you asked a question a stranger could ask. Nothing that required knowing anybody. What brought you here, where are you from, do you live nearby. She went first, naturally, she was always quicker off the mark than me, and she asked what my favorite thing about Sandskip was, and I said the off-season, the way the main street went quiet after the first cold week and the shuttered ice cream place stayed shut and the whole town seemed to exhale.

"You live here year round?"

"Dune side," I said. "A mile's walk from the market. Tuesdays I shop, the rest of the days I read and walk the beach and cook things that take too long for one person, which is a stupid hobby but it's mine."

"It's not stupid," she said. "Cooking for one too long is just cooking. What do you make?"

"Stews. Braises. Things that want hours and don't care who eats them."

"I'd like that," she said, and then caught herself, because a stranger wouldn't say that, a stranger would say something more careful, and we both sat with that little slip for a second and let it go by without comment. That was the game working, I think. The game was less about pretending than about noticing where the pretending strained.

I asked her where she was from and she said a city two states over, which was true and also not, and she said she was visiting her sister, which was true and also not, and I said what does your sister do and she said she owns a leaky house on a point and bullies people into staying with her, and I laughed a real laugh at that, and she looked pleased, like I'd passed something.

"What's your favorite thing about where you live," I asked, because I had been saving a question and it seemed like the safe place to spend it.

"Secondhand bookshops," she said. "I go into every one I pass. I have too many books. My sister says